HITM3 (2024): Thinking, Filming & Editing a Cutscene
HITM3 (2024): Thinking, Filming & Editing a Cutscene
Xiri on how he showed his trio making some empanadas and love.
Find the developer elsewhere: [Twitter] [itch.io]
I’m Xiri, developer of HITM3. A slice-of-life game where you help your lover make his own movie. As Nam, you live your days with your beloved pack in a low poly Santiago de Chile, watching movies, delivering empanadas and slowly evolving your relationship of care.
When I started making games, I thought I was starting from scratch, that everything I knew until that point was to be left behind and everything to learn now, was to be new. With HITM3, I realised that, even if I had to understand how Unity/Blender worked, my other experiences could help me build the game.
With that in mind, I would like to share how one of the cutscenes for HITM3 was shaped through my experiences of filming and editing music videos.
As said by editing teacher Joan Marimón, thinking, filming and editing is the same labour in a rising progression. At this point in the story, the boys have had a fight between them and after a talk in the park, they have just made up. The cutscene that follows picture them coming back home, making a new batch of empanadas and some love along with the music of Lia Nadja. There are two songs that could play in this cutscene depending if at a point, you find some familiar faces kissing behind some bushes. If you tell your lover Astra what you saw, it’ll play “Sanar” with the lyrics “If you lie, you lie to your heart and then you make your insides sick”. If you don’t or just don’t find the bushes, it’ll play “Escondiéndote” with the lyrics of “You live as if you were an animal, hiding from what hurts you.”
To begin, I animated the trio making empanadas in the kitchen and created different cameras to shoot them. Each one of them had a post effect processing that turns the environment into an orange sunset. When it came to the sex scene, at first, I tried to shy away by filming them symbolically floating in a yolky dome. It wasn’t working. Director Tsai Ming-liang once said that to battle his fears of filming his first sex scene, he put a watermelon between their actors and then he felt comfortable doing it. For me, this comfort came by putting the camera so far away and zooming in, that the drawing distance of the game made the trio become a silhouette.
The consequences of adding a new camera and trying a new angle are much less severe here in Unity than if you had to reorganise with your actors and locations a new day of shooting. To avoid being stuck on an endless pool of possibilities, I like to make sure that I only start editing a scene when I have all the footage. This way of working brings a tension to the process that helps everything move forward.
Now that we have all the footage, it’s time to start editing. My teacher Joan Marimón once asked us “What is editing?”. It's the most beautiful job in the world - he said - you’re a magician transforming the watcher (or player here) to adopt new attitudes to face reality. In my case, I answered with this video:
I like editing so much, because it’s not about yourself but about what you have in front of you. You ask the images how they are and by listening, you only need to follow them and go where they lead to. This conversation is something I really enjoy and I’m always trying to bring this process to every aspect of the game.
One of the biggest fears of starting making games, was that I had to turn myself into a game developer, that I had to develop a new set of abilities to start making games. With HITM3 I realized I can just be an editor who happens to make games or even better, nothing at all.
Game Bounty
I would like to play a moody story like Looking for an Angel (1999) by Akihiro Suzuki, two friends remembering a loved one. Another movie that would turn into a really fun video game is Naughty Boys (2002) by Koichi Imaizumi. The night of your birthday you find out that your boyfriend has cheated on you so you set out on a nightly adventure to cheat him back. Explore the night and meet strangers while you battle your own jealousy, excitement and pettiness.
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